Toronto Film Festival

Al Pacino Makes Fun of Himself in The Humbling, and Gives One of His Best Modern Performances

While we all eagerly await Reese Witherspoon’s big comeback film Wild, which premieres here at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, there are some smaller reinventions happening that are worth taking a moment to consider. Yesterday I saw a new and improved Keira Knightley in the smart, sweet comedy Laggies, and this morning I watched Al Pacino, that luminary often lost to caricature, do something fresh, invigorating, and exciting in Barry Levinson’s new film The Humbling.

Based on a novel by the revered chronicler of male malaise Philip Roth, The Humbling tells the story of an actor in decline—pushing 70 and seemingly losing his grip on both his profession and his sanity, Pacino’s Simon Axler is a sad, shuffling totem of a great existential fear shared by many male writers of Roth’s ilk: what happens when the guys for whom the world was seemingly built are left behind by that same world. Naturally, Simon finds a young, pretty rock to cling to in Greta Gerwig’s Pegeen, the daffy, coltish daughter of two of Simon’s old acting buddies (the funny, needling Dan Hedaya and Dianne Wiest). As is often the case in Roth-ian stories like this, all a man really needs is a young, spirited, sexy woman to lift him out of his existential funk.

Or so it seems at first. What’s admirable about The Humbling is that, though it does eventually sink under the weight of its own misogynistic muck, it doesn’t immediately praise Simon for having the ingenuity to find an ingenue. It’s creepy that they’re together, and many characters, including Simon, remark on that fact throughout the film. In some ways, Levinson is parodying that tired old trope, which suggests that men’s experience is the perfect, natural complement to women’s beauty (which is directly tied to their youth). The Humbling is actually about humbling, as Simon learns to accept his failures and limitations, with only a thin sense of Roth’s weary but indignant anger at a world that would deny a man—a man!—anything hovering around the edges.

Throughout all this psychological muttering Pacino is lively and present, giving a funny, nuanced performance for the first time in a long while—if you don’t count HBO movies, anyway. He and Gerwig do have a weird, undeniable rapport with one another, and he spars nicely with Wiest and Charles Grodin, who plays his eternally optimistic agent. There is undoubtedly some measure of art imitating life in Pacino’s slyly self-deprecating performance, but if Simon was capable of the kind of controlled chaos that Pacino does here, he probably wouldn’t be as washed-up as he is. Levinson also stages something of a reinvention, shooting his film in the shaky, wandering artsy aesthetic of current indie cinema in crafty, and often beautiful, ways. (He’s aided by Marcel Zarvos’s lovely, aching score.) It’s great to see these two old guys finding new tricks, even if the ultimate message of the movie is muddled by a sloppily drawn line between reality and delusion.

I’m also not a fan of the film’s, and Roth’s, sexual politics, which reach a nadir with the guffawing introduction of a transgender character, played by Tony Award-winner Billy Porter. Gerwig’s character is (was?) a lesbian, who used to date Porter’s character before he was a man, and there’s some horny, condescending attention paid to that, as if lesbianism is a silly pose that willful, impulsive young women strike before finding the right (older) man who will sternly f--k some sense (and femininity, somehow) into them. But, again, this is a sneaky movie, and I think it might be hip to those tired old prejudices and is actually tweaking them a bit. If true, I wish that intention was a little better articulated. Still, The Humbling is a fascinating actorly exercise for Pacino, and a stylish experiment in form for Levinson. Pacino still has Manglehorn, from director David Gordon Green, yet to screen here at TIFF, so this could soon become a festival dominated by a 74-year-old guy with surprisingly great performances still left in him. Wouldn’t that be something?